Steam in the living room: The Steam Box's past, present and potential future

Features Editor Greg Newbegin writes, "In a year’s time, the state of the video game industry is likely to look very different. It seems like a safe bet that Sony and Microsoft will release their new PlayStation and Xbox consoles sometime in 2013, and if that’s not the case, it’s almost certain they’ll at least announce them. What those systems will look like in terms of advanced functionality and so on remains to be seen, but with the lengthy gap between this point and the previous hardware generation (6-7 years), and the recent release of Nintendo’s Wii U — not to mention the news that has recently come out of CES 2013 (detailed below) — the precise future of the industry is a little uncertain."